Links 6.1.10

Sorry about the Monday-links-on-Tuesday thing. I was intending to post them as usual, but what started out as a brief intro about Memorial Day ran away with me and became a post of its own.

Well, here are the links to help you ease back into Real Life after the long weekend.

The Great Hunger: You might have seen the hullabaloo about the proposed auction of a collection of letters written by Irish landowners during the years of the great famine. After much concern that a private collector would snap them up, an archive bought the letters and it looks as if they will stay in Ireland. In the aftermath, one columnist had an interesting answer to the question posed by many letter writers to the Irish Times: “Why don’t we have a famine museum?” Apparently there is one, but people don’t know it exists.

A fab genealogy job: I feel very stupid, but until this week, I did not know there was such a thing as a professional probate genealogist. Now I do. The title is now stuck in my head as part of an imaginary detective yarn: “Lynch here; professional probate genealogist. I understand there’s been a discrepancy in a birthdate.”

Finding graves: Did you see the current 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy challenge on exploring Find-A-Grave? Get fired up with this interesting profile of an active Find-A-Grave volunteer — how she got started and what it’s really like chasing down headstones.

Military matters: Memorial Day reminiscing can be an on-ramp to the genealogy highway. If this past weekend got you curious about a military ancestor, here are some good places to start: the military section of Cyndi’s List; a nice primer at Olive Tree Genealogy; and of course, the military records section at the National Archives.